Tom Waits from 'Small Change', 1976.

Tom Traubert's Blues, (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)


Wasted and wounded
It ain't what the moon did
Got what I paid for now
See you tomorrow
Hey Frank can I borrow
A couple of bucks from you
To go waltzing Matilda waltzing Matilda
You'll go a-waltzing Matilda with me

I'm an innocent victim
of a blinded alley
An' I'm tired of all these soldiers here
No-one speaks English
And everything's broken
And my staceys are soaking wet,
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You'll go a waltzing Matilda with me

Now the dogs are barking
and the taxi cab's parking
A lot they can do for me
I begged you to stab me
You tore my shirt open
And I'm down on my knees tonight

Old Bushmills I staggered
You bury the dagger
Your silhouette window light
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You'll go a waltzing Matilda with me

Now I've lost my St. Christopher
Now that I've kissed her
And the one-arm bandit knows
And the maverick Chinaman
in the cold-blooded sign
And the girls down by the striptease shows go
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You'll go a waltzing Matilda with me

No I don't want your sympathy
Fugitives say
that the streets aren't for dreaming now
Manslaughter dragnet
and the ghosts that sell memories
They want a piece of the action anyhow
Go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You'll go waltzing Matilda with me

And you can ask any sailor
And the keys from the jailor
And the old men in wheelchairs know
Matilda's the defendant
She killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing matilda, you'll go a-waltzing matilda with me

A battered old suitcase,
In a hotel someplace,
And a wound that will never heal.
No prima donna, that perfume is on an old shirt
That is stained with
Blood and whiskey
And goodnight to the street sweepers
The night watchmen, flame keepers
And goodnight Matilda too.

"I'm gonna do a song called 'Waltzing Matilda'. It's not really the original 'Waltzing Matilda', I kinda bent it out of shape. And eh... but eh.. I was eh around this beautiful girl for a while and I was really crazy about her... so was her husband. So we could've made quite a trio on piano, bass, and drums. So eh what happened was eh... Well it's eh... Actually it's a real short story. I drank too much and I threw up over my tennis shoes and went to sleep in a men's room..." (Tom Waits, West Chester Jazz Festival. West Chester, USA, 1976)


"For a long time the story has been told, that Tom Waits wrote the song about the violinist Mathilde Bondo, and that's the truth, Mathilde assures us: 'He was in Copenhagen in 1976 to perform in a tv-show, in which I played the violin. And afterwards I of course had to show him the City - we were in Tivoli and on Christianshavn. It was a lovely night out", says Mathilde Bondo."

Hearing Impaired like a Constipated Owl

Jodee Berry, of Panama City, Florida, U.S.A., was a waitress at Hooters.
As part of a sales promotion, in April... The waitresses were told the one who sold most beer would win a new Toyota.
Or that's what she thought she heard.
Jodee won, and was led blindfold to the parking lot, and told she could take the blindfold off, and see her prize.... This. A new toy Yoda.
The manager was crying tears of mirth.
Not the winning waitress.
She sued the company, who settled out of court, after realising they were going to lose. The settlement?A sum of money, sufficient for her to go into a Toyota Dealership and choose any car she wanted.....
No news on whether she kept her old toy Yoda.


Via StumbleUpon

Dwarf, Vacuum Cleaner, ..........Superglue?

Are you with me?
Captain Dan, The Demon Dwarf, pictured below, the resident Vacuum-Dwarf of the Circus of Horrors, (who are currently performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival), has an act where he pulls a vacuum cleaner across the stage with his penis... Nothing strange about that, of course, simple enough good wholesome family entertainment? Well it seems he got himself into a sticky pre-dick?-ament, when he tried to mend his um... nozzle, with Superglue.

( I remember, by the way, in my schooldays, being told that 'Nature Abhors a Vacuum'... I think that phrase was commuted to 'nature abhors a DIRTY vacuum', when vacuum cleaners were invented.) Not that that is relevant.
Captain Dan's special friend is a vacuum cleaner called 'Henry'. And Dan inserts his... umm shall we say nozzle? into Henry's sucking equipment and Henry, sucking... follows him about the stage.
I've never seen this, of course. I have to take the press release's word for this. All went wrong when Henry suffered a sucking-part fracture as stage time loomed, perhaps by what Frank Zappa, in 'Joe's Garage', referred to as "Plooting too hard", in the section on Joe's perverse activities with household appliances.
Dan, using the leadership powers he oviously has as an officer and a Captain, sought out some rapid glue. Perhaps he was flustered by the nearness of performance time, or perhaps the instructions were too high up on the tube for a diminutive reader, because Dan failed to observe that the glue's active period was twenty minutes, not twenty seconds.
Previously, Henry's intimate grasp had always released at the flick of a switch, their relationship was a stage one only. This time, Henry did not let Dan loose.
After some buttering and tugging, and not a little pulling and jerking, our diminutive star and his electrical friend elected to visit Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. A direct ambulance to the accident and emergency department, (where staff too often are short on laughs). I suspect they won't forget this couple in a hurry.

Dan and Henry were parted after about an hour.
link to story

Tinyurl. Life's too short to bother messing about with huge web addresses.

Here's a most useful something I found long ago, and kind of assumed everybody knew about it. Now of course I know they don't.

Ever wanted to send someone a link/web-address, And found it composed of an unmanageable scramble of characters, impossible to memorise, and several lines long?
That link, or address is called a URL, Or 'Uniform Resource Locator', in the language of the internet
the web depends on accurate addresses to locate the many millions of items on the vast number of computers, yours and mine included, maybe, and bring you the one you want.
Here is one to one of my posts....http://gritinthegears.blogspot.com/2007/08/from-summer-with-monika-roger-mcgough.html
Unwieldy isn't it?...
But easy compared to:-
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Rievaulx+Abbey,+Rievaulx,
+York,+North+Yorkshire+YO62,+United+Kingdom&ie=UTF8&cd=1&sll=37.0625,
-95.677068&sspn=27.504711,59.765625&ll=54.260361,-1.116872&spn=0.009876,0.029182&t
=k&z=15&iwloc=addr&om=1

Help is at hand in the form of TinyURL. Just for you, I've added a widget in my sidebar. Paste that mess into it and... Click on 'Make tinyurl', hey presto, the mess becomes:- http://tinyurl.com/2k6r8n

The 248 characters of the original are trimmed to just 25, yet they still get to the same page.
(Actually they don't, because I had to snip the original to fold it into this text space, urls don't like to be snipped)

On tiny's homepage you can find a widget to drag to your toolbar, which I find a boon. Especially when I want to leave a link in a comment, because I just can't ever be bothered to mess around
with HTML, which I hate with a passion.

That's it.
If you found it helpful, do please let me know.

From "Summer With Monika", Roger McGough. 1967

Monica,
the tea things are taking over,
the cups are as big as bubble cars
they throttle round the room,
the tin-openers skate on the greasy plates
by the light of the silvery moon.
The biscuits are having a party
they’re necking in our bread bin,
that’s jazz you hear in the salt cellars
but they don’t let non-members in.
The egg spoons had our eggs for breakfast,
the sauce bottle’s asleep in our bed,
I overheard the knives and forks
it won’t be long, they said
it won’t be long, they said,
and it wasn’t.

It all started yesterday evening

as I was helping the potatoes off with their jackets
I heard you making a date with the kettle,
I distinctly heard you making a date with the kettle,
my kettle.
Then at midnight,
In the half light,
When I was polishing the blue speckles in a famous soap powder,
I saw you fondling the frying-pan,
I distinctly saw you fondling the frying-pan,
My frying-pan.
Finally at mid-dawn,
In the half light
While waiting in the cool shadows beneath the sink,
I saw you making love with the gas cooker,
I distinctly saw you making love with the gas cooker,
My gas cooker.
My mistake was to leap upon you crying,
Monica, spare the saucers.
For now I’m alone,
you having left me for someone with a bigger kitchen.

'Ladies and gentlemen,
I apologise sincerely for being unable to attend this evening's performance. Owing to pressure of work, an increasing sense of unreality, and the fear of drowning in a sea of upturned faces, I have employed an out-of-work actor to impersonate me. On my behalf he will read poems, answer questions, sign books, get drunk and generally keep up the poetic image. Of course, there will be weaknesses in performance, the overeagerness to please, the nervous mannerisms too consciously affected, and it goes without saying that he lacks the charisma, charm, wit and raw animal sexuality of the real poet. I trust, however, that you will enjoy the evening, and forgive my underpaid stand-in should the mask slip and his true self show through.
Yours faithfully,
Roger McGough'

Summer with Monica Roger McGough Illust. Peter Blake Penguin ISBN 0 14 058648 2

Meeting on the Ledge

Meet on the Ledge was written by Richard Thompson, This version appeared on the Fairport Convention album "What We Did on Our Holidays", in 1969.

Meet On The Ledge

(Richard Thompson)

We used to say that come the day
We'd all be making songs
Or finding better words
These ideas never lasted long

The way is up along the road
The air is growing thin
Too many friends who tried
Blown off this mountain with the wind

Meet on the ledge, we're gonna meet on the ledge
When my time is up I'm gonna see all my friends
Meet on the ledge, we're gonna meet on the ledge
If you really mean it, it all comes round again

And now I see I'm all alone
But that's the only way to be
You'll have your chance again
Then you can do the work for me.

Meet on the ledge, we're gonna meet on the ledge
When my time is up I'm gonna see all my friends
Meet on the ledge, we're gonna meet on the ledge
If you really mean it, it all comes round again.

Meet on the ledge, we're gonna meet on the ledge
When my time is up I'm gonna see all my friends
Meet on the ledge, we're gonna meet on the ledge
If you really mean it, it all comes round again...

Writing.....

Well, not writing really. They won't let me have any pointy pens or pencils in here.......

I'm losing patience with my neighbours, Mr Bush

Just to clarify, I did NOT write this. It is By Terry Jones, one-time Monty Python member, and was published in the Observer on Sunday January 26, 2003.

Terry Jones

The Observer

I'm really excited by George Bush's latest reason for bombing Iraq: he's running out of patience. And so am I! For some time now I've been really pissed off with Mr Johnson, who lives a couple of doors down the street. Well, him and Mr Patel, who runs the health food shop. They both give me queer looks, and I'm sure Mr Johnson is planning something nasty for me, but so far I haven't been able to discover what. I've been round to his place a few times to see what he's up to, but he's got everything well hidden. That's how devious he is. As for Mr Patel, don't ask me how I know, I just know - from very good sources - that he is, in reality, a Mass Murderer. I have leafleted the street telling them that if we don't act first, he'll pick us off one by one. Some of my neighbours say, if I've got proof, why don't I go to the police? But that's simply ridiculous. The police will say that they need evidence of a crime with which to charge my neighbours. They'll come up with endless red tape and quibbling about the rights and wrongs of a pre-emptive strike and all the while Mr Johnson will be finalising his plans to do terrible things to me, while Mr Patel will be secretly murdering people. Since I'm the only one in the street with a decent range of automatic firearms, I reckon it's up to me to keep the peace. But until recently that's been a little difficult. Now, however, George W. Bush has made it clear that all I need to do is run out of patience, and then I can wade in and do whatever I want! And let's face it, Mr Bush's carefully thought-out policy towards Iraq is the only way to bring about international peace and security. The one certain way to stop Muslim fundamentalist suicide bombers targeting the US or the UK is to bomb a few Muslim countries that have never threatened us. That's why I want to blow up Mr Johnson's garage and kill his wife and children. Strike first! That'll teach him a lesson. Then he'll leave us in peace and stop peering at me in that totally unacceptable way. Mr Bush makes it clear that all he needs to know before bombing Iraq is that Saddam is a really nasty man and that he has weapons of mass destruction - even if no one can find them. I'm certain I've just as much justification for killing Mr Johnson's wife and children as Mr Bush has for bombing Iraq. Mr Bush's long-term aim is to make the world a safer place by eliminating 'rogue states' and 'terrorism'. It's such a clever long-term aim because how can you ever know when you've achieved it? How will Mr Bush know when he's wiped out all terrorists? When every single terrorist is dead? But then a terrorist is only a terrorist once he's committed an act of terror. What about would-be terrorists? These are the ones you really want to eliminate, since most of the known terrorists, being suicide bombers, have already eliminated themselves. Perhaps Mr Bush needs to wipe out everyone who could possibly be a future terrorist? Maybe he can't be sure he's achieved his objective until every Muslim fundamentalist is dead? But then some moderate Muslims might convert to fundamentalism. Maybe the only really safe thing to do would be for Mr Bush to eliminate all Muslims? It's the same in my street. Mr Johnson and Mr Patel are just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of other people in the street who I don't like and who - quite frankly - look at me in odd ways. No one will be really safe until I've wiped them all out. My wife says I might be going too far but I tell her I'm simply using the same logic as the President of the United States. That shuts her up. Like Mr Bush, I've run out of patience, and if that's a good enough reason for the President, it's good enough for me. I'm going to give the whole street two weeks - no, 10 days - to come out in the open and hand over all aliens and interplanetary hijackers, galactic outlaws and interstellar terrorist masterminds, and if they don't hand them over nicely and say 'Thank you', I'm going to bomb the entire street to kingdom come. It's just as sane as what George W. Bush is proposing - and, in contrast to what he's intending, my policy will destroy only one street.